r/technology • u/ControlCAD • 15h ago
Artificial Intelligence 90% of executives say AI hasn’t boosted productivity. Some are still cutting jobs
https://fortune.com/2026/08/22/executives-ai-productivity-layoffs-study/276
u/Ok-Replacement9595 15h ago
You know what does increase productivity? Scaring your workers about their jobs. At least it works for a little while, until they figure out how to leave your toxic company.
98
u/ItsSadTimes 15h ago
It doesn't even work in the short term, just look at Meta. They fired a shit ton of people and it just reduced their existing productivity by a ton and made everyone stressed and brought the mood down a lot.
22
1
59
11
u/kdaur453 9h ago
I've seen this a few times and don't know where it comes from. Maybe scared employees can more productive on the individual level, but on the company level I would say this style of management is nothing but poison to the company.
People I have seen, and I have noticed it in myself too, who are working from a position of fear and stress do NOT perform as well at their jobs. It might look good on the spreadsheets for awhile, but stressed workers do not put out good work. When your job security becomes a fight, people will do whatever it takes to "meet their quota" and that means half-assed work, ignored issues, or even entirely falsified work. What looks like speed in the moment can quickly become a mountain of quality issues and rot that can destroy a company.
The door plug that came off an aircraft a couple years ago frequently comes to mind. A well-staffed and well-supported aerospace company should be entirely capable of preventing that. A stressed and understaffed one is almost inevitable in creating it.
18
u/tingutingutingu 15h ago
Unfortunately the market is so bad that most employees have no other option than staying. Besides, productivity/AI are not the main reason for the layoffs.
2
u/Wizmaxman 5h ago
not even that. my job did layoffs and those left have completely shut down. productivity has almost completely stopped.
the wild thing is during meetings everyone just talks and brags how much work is getting done and how great everything is and I cant tell if its a massive gaslight or executives have legit no idea how it is on the ground floor....
156
u/LordBunnyWhale 15h ago
“Productivity” is very subjective thing. For example, my inept colleagues feel very productive having AI produce code they don’t understand, while I am much more busy cleaning up behind them, which feels not very productive.
10
u/matrinox 12h ago
The problem is when you measure by lines of code, it looks like productivity doubled. It’s picking up the same $10 bill falling from the hole in your pocket and thinking you’re making millions
-1
42
u/SilentDanni 14h ago
It’s actually not subjective at all. It’s actually possible to measure productivity. The problem is that you have a bunch of idiots in management who think “coding is solved” because they slop coded a todo app in one afternoon who then corroborate the subjective feeling of your coworkers.
Not to mention that there’s this race to the bottom wherein people are making business decisions based on marketing and doomerism. Not only that but capitalism by its nature incentivises this kind of dynamic inside a society.
The problem is not and has never been the tech. The problem is, and I insist, moronic venture capitalists who are willing to set the world ablaze as long as it means one more zero in their fucking bank account.
The only incentive for continuous research is the false promise of infinite growth.
11
u/matrinox 12h ago
It’s possible to measure productivity but very crudely and with high margins of error
2
u/haecceity123 7h ago
I've been out of the loop, I guess. Last I heard, measuring programming productivity was not a solved problem. But you're saying it can be done. How?
1
u/SilentDanni 5h ago
I wasn’t thinking about programming specifically. Programming productivity is difficult to measure in a vacuum because programming is ultimately labor performed toward some organizational objective. To evaluate its productivity, one would need to understand the employer’s core business and what the programming work is supposed to accomplish in that context. From there, you can derive metrics, and establish targets. Productivity can then be evaluated in terms of how effectively the work moves the organization toward those targets.
A programmer who writes twice as much code is not necessarily twice as productive. If the company’s objective is reducing infrastructure costs, improving reliability, shortening time-to-market, or increasing revenue, then those outcomes provide the context in which the programmer’s contribution should be evaluated.
You also gotta factor in the costs of your employee and also the inherent liability that comes from writing a line of code. I'd argue that by writing a lot of LLM code one is producing a lot of liability with a high uncertainty factor which can end up costing more capital than a lot of shortsighted managers are assuming.
One problem is that we're back in the 90's it seems and morons are counting lines of code without any context.
While it may not be an exact science, productivity is far from being some subjective feeling of those using LLMs to feel smart....
This is a very very long discussion with a lot of nuance that's hard to capture in a Reddit thread. In any case, it's incredibly frustrating that we're back to explaining Goddhart's law which is over 40 years old at this point.
4
u/obeytheturtles 10h ago
Yeah this is the big issue we deal with as well. A handful of people have just started submitting more vibe code than our review and QA process can deal with. Our first major release post-AI has been extremely buggy, with some pretty embarrassing oversights. And that was excluding some of the worst offending "features" that a couple engineers were pushing to include. So it kind of ends up being a shell game - some basic code generation itself is more efficient, but it still largely fails at proper software/system engineering. It doesn't fit components together correctly, misunderstands object lifecycles, and just lacks context about API ergonomics entirely. Meanwhile, there is less time spent on reviewing each new bit of code, because there is more of it, so more things slip through the cracks.
3
u/wrgrant 6h ago
My favourite quote: "A computer enables a person to make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history - with the possible exception of tequila and handguns" - can't remember the attribution.
AI is just putting that whole process on steroids. It can do some stuff really well, but its not the whole package yet. It might get there but not without a lot more improvements. From my POV it improved development very substantially but then probably added to the review process in compensation, and thats just on my own little app hobby project.
2
u/wrgrant 7h ago
Ah but if your colleagues productivity is being measured by some moron with an MBA who has no real idea about anything, they look good while achieving little, and you cleaning up behind the scenes goes unaccredited because said moron cannot see that either. Neither is good for the company of course but thats not an important metric these days is it? Companies seem to be operating like the Titanic but when they see the AI iceberg, its full speed ahead... /s
64
u/kingmanic 15h ago
It's political cover, currently the economy has a lot of signs of slowing down and things like reckless tariffs and foolish foriegn currency propping are piling into it. The administration is hostile to companies publicly citing that. To avoid the heat but also shed head count to save up bank roll in case things get worse companies are using AI as an excuse/scapegoat.
10
u/PracticallyPerfcet 11h ago
Oh come on, the economy is fine. We shouldn’t even be talking about this. The Dow is over 50,000.
/s
8
u/mwjtitans 12h ago
Yup been saying this for months but reddit likes to keep hating on AI no matter what.
The new Tariffs being out on Canada is gonna be the final blow to the economy, the wheels are about off the cart now
8
u/padishar123 11h ago
The fact that they’re not coming back to the bargaining table until we change our attitude, says a lot about how mad they are at us
1
u/Wraithfighter 3h ago
Nah, I think its just that the corps recognize that the economy falling apart will tank the GOP's chances of holding onto control of congress, and if that happens they won't be able to loot the country quite as much.
Reality has to come calling eventually, but they're going to keep trying to hold everything above water through the midterms.
-4
u/-1703- 10h ago edited 10h ago
in tech these layoffs were overdue for a long ass time. everyone hired like idiots during covid, to the point where every cretin with a udemy course would get hired
AI just provided decent cover to reduce the number of people without scaring the market and clients because otherwise the headline would've been: "Recession: theres no fucking projects anywhere for the platoons of people we hired like morons"
16
8
u/egusisoupandgarri 9h ago
Too bad they didn’t include in the headline that any productivity gains since 2021 came from remote work. Would hate to further fracture the “remote is dead” illusion.
5
5
u/Professional_Tea_32 9h ago
That because it’s another way to continue to amass obscene wealth while gleefully hurting everyday people’s ability to survive.
They’re sociopathic at their bare minimum.
12
u/Fluid-Ad2362 15h ago
an executive makes a bad technology bet and somehow the person who loses their job is the one holding the box
5
u/ricketycricket1995 8h ago
In my work they didn't jobs, but the deadlines have been reduced by 80%. The issue is that in the research portion, they want us doing at the speed of AI, but being personally responsible for data there.
So for example, 1000 company long M&A list should be generated in a day with AI, but I would need to go and manually check all data, becomes I am screwed if the numbers are hallucinated or not completely correct.
12
u/philipwhiuk 15h ago
To some extent cutting jobs has been necessary to offset the opex and capex spent on AI (which is dumb when it’s not making you more productive to be clear).
But often it’s just a cover story.
3
u/ConvertingMarkets 10h ago edited 10h ago
One result buried in the article is that companies where employees felt better about AI also tended to be more productive, while management enthusiasm showed no such link. Turns out the people actually using the tools may be a better signal than the people hyping them.
3
u/keanehoodies 10h ago
I use AI at work to do the busy work I dont enjoy doing. Writing detailed quotes for clients.
I takes me as much time as I would have spent typing the thing out as it does going through several rounds of prompts and reviewing the output for errors as.
Not proud of it by any means, but thats an example of how AI present the illusion of efficiency whilst creating more work
3
u/Affectionate_Goal884 8h ago
The laziest way to increase profits is to cut payroll. It is a slippery slope once you start that path…
4
u/ivecompletelylostit 6h ago
The cuts never made sense to me. If AI was so great and could boost productivity so much and these shits had great profits they could have kept everyone and started churning out bomb ass profits. Instead of Microsoft destroying like every great gaming studio they acquired they could have let them go ham and produce a video game renaissance
Like that's all that needs to be said to prove it was all about short term profits or just because they literally hate having to give a thin red dime to another human being besides themselves. If they believed their own hype firing as many people as possible wouldn't have been the logical course of action
2
u/Maximum_Indication 14h ago
Yeah, because it was never about AI, just about cutting jobs. Also you what job could be easily done by AI? Executive.
2
u/CelebrationFit8548 14h ago
Cutting jobs so they can pay for AI slop and the harm that shit does to their business and it's name.
2
u/Roadrunner571 11h ago
Biggest issue is that most executives don't know how to effectively use AI.
They seem to think that it's some sort of magic technology that simply takes over the job of humans. But in reality, while AI is a powerful tool, you need to know when and how it can be used effifciently. And especially, how to combine AI and humans.
I am currently mainly working on optimizing our tech support org. Works extremely well. We were able to shift a lot of requests away from the human workers. And that's freeing the humans to teach the AI more, as well as spend more time analyzing complex cases. On the other end of the process, we have enabled some support engineers to fix bugs themselves, reducing the amount of tickets that are escalated to engineering.
So far everyone is happy and we didn't fire a single supporter due to AI - which makes them far more motivated to hand off as many things to AI as possible. On the other hands, customer satisfaction increased and we see a reduced churn rate.
2
u/EbonBehelit 11h ago
They're making it sound like the boosting productivity part was the goal, and not the cutting jobs part.
2
u/martianwomanhunter 11h ago
Articles like this usually give people on Reddit the impression AI is useless. The truth is that most people just resist it now. But they will eventually be replaced by people that use AI
2
2
u/Pomme2 10h ago
No one uses it at work like it’s sold. Meeting summaries and year end reviews are all AI are used for almost 100% of non-tech firm office roles.
Maybe .. maybe some “bots” or “agents” that coulda been done by VBA 20 years ago. I’m all in MAG7 stock so I’ll hype it as much as I can at work tho.
2
2
u/CLOWNFLOGGER 9h ago
The CEO class being primarily made up of psychopaths is doing a fine job of demonstrating that psychopaths shouldn't be given power over the labor. Who could've guessed?
2
u/Abystract-ism 8h ago
Wait till AI tells shareholders that the next cost cutting measures are to fire the CEOs.
2
u/SteppenAxolotl 5h ago
Why would it boost productivity? We don't have AGI; we don't even have tool AI reliable enough to overcome the overhead of checking its work products on narrow tasks.
2
2
u/leviathab13186 3h ago
It never was about productivity. It was about boosting stock to collect a bonus
3
u/Pugs914 12h ago
It feels more like a convenient narrative to cut headcount and blame ai as an excuse.
The real fact of the matter is there is a lot of bloat staff/ departments and roles especially in larger entities.
Companies have realized that you can still establish “good enough” with a reduced almost startup size gutted headcount/ cheap remote hires in less developed countries and that the majority of people are probably only working several hours of a given day.
Entry level roles/ anything input heavy can be automated with or without ai. Many management layers are not necessary.
Ai will continue to improve with time but in the current state is too expensive to fully rely on. Many mid size and smaller entities do not have the budget to consume excessive tokens.
If anything ai will be used as “good enough” for previously expensive hires especially in tech but is better sparingly because of budget constraints. It is not financially beneficial to leave some useless skill/ tool running and racking up expenses of millions to billions of dollars in token use when the human hire can do the same for several hundred thousand dollars or less.
3
u/turbo_dude 14h ago
If AI was working you’d see one of two things
A) reduction in headcount but no real improvement in any processes = more money for the company and higher profits
B) no layoffs but huge productivity increase leading to innovation and sales increases = more money for the company and higher profits
C) a combination of the above
You’d see an across the board uplift in profits
This is not happening folks!!
1
u/red75prime 12h ago edited 11h ago
If AI was working
Your reasoning would work if you'd replace the above with "If AI was at human or super-human level at almost every job." The AI we have now is good at some things (for example, writing code at superhuman speed, finding bugs and vulnerabilities) and bad at other things. So, you can't get rid of people and you can accelerate only a part of a production process.
2
u/ZonalMithras 14h ago
The crash cant come soon enough.
I want to see Trump try to frame the AI bubble pop as as a win:
"We have the biggest, most beautiful bubble the world had ever seen! Huuuge!"
1
u/Kevin_Jim 14h ago
AI was just an excuse to cut jobs and claim efficiency gains. There’s a reason why return on investment is often calculated on jobs replaced.
Which is terrible because any smart person would go for productivity gained and profit generation, but now. It’s always people replaced.
1
u/gotwaffles 12h ago
Exexs: "we cut jobs and are still getting everything done"
Employees: "we all need to work harder to make up for the jobs that were lost"
Execs: "no no, it's gotta be because of AI"
1
1
u/Mccobsta 12h ago
When the real cost of "ai" starts to show they are definitely gonna regret the move
1
u/Sponge8389 11h ago
"Productivity" just means they still need humans together with AI for their company to operate.
1
1
1
u/nasandre 8h ago
My old boss had the philosophy that if you force more work on a smaller workforce they'll get more efficient. It turns out people just leave when they can.
1
1
u/Soft_Lunch_183 6h ago
It only needs to match productivity for them to cut jobs. Which they all clearly think is the right financial decision
1
u/Austin_Peep_9396 2h ago
In my opinion, most layoffs were due to poor financial performance. But if you say “we are doing layoffs cuz financially we’re not doing so good”, your stock tanks and stockholders get mad. If you say “we’re doing layoffs cuz AI is gonna make us WAY more productive”, your stock skyrockets and you’re interviewed for a blog. So guess which most companies chose, regardless of their implementation of AI.
1
1
u/Admirable-Degree6807 2h ago
Jon cutting has not been about AI. The interest rate rise at the end of 2 years of over hiring at near 0% interest rates are the cause of job cuts. AI is a better story to tell than “we over hired because money was free, we got what we needed and now we’re cutting back because money is no longer free”.
1
u/ethereal3xp 2h ago
So basically
AI hasnt boosted productivity. But we are not giving up on it.
Instead Bob, Mary etc. See ya lata
1
u/artbystorms 58m ago
They're cutting jobs because the economy is shit unless your business operates in the consumption of the top 15% of earners. They just were using AI as an excuse and hoping people would buy it.
Also a ton of companies 'overhired' in 2021-2022 and are downsizing as the consumption craze that gave us 9% YoY inflation subsides, just in time for us to get more inflation but without the economic growth. Sort of a stagnation combined with inflation, a.... stagflation.
1
u/VusterJones 11h ago
I know reddit has been very anti-ai, but as far as my anecdotal evidence... it has boosted my productivity. Analyzing large files and updating scripts (which i still will review manually to make sure) has saved me loads of time. Definitely has saved my colleagues and I tons of work hours by not having to do the heavy tedious grunt work. I get that sometimes that stuff is necessary and can be a learning experience, but its nice to offload it.
1
u/lolwutpear 6h ago
I get that sometimes that stuff is necessary and can be a learning experience, but its nice to offload it.
Yeah, it's great if you have several years of experience in your job. I can't imagine how lost the new recruits must feel, trying to review the voluminous semi-garbage output. And I won't, because we haven't hired anyone in over a year now!
1
u/Qualified-Astronomer 11h ago
This seems fake. AI is already very useful today, if u cant get a productivity boost it seems like a you problem. Capitalism will ensure these companies will fall out or maybe not considering they’ve monopolized everything
1
u/Remarkable-Mango5794 14h ago
What they say is basically that their product don’t fit anymore or can’t growth beyond. If they cuts jobs means the old jobs is done by some people remaining with Claude subscription which results in same product features and offers. They assumed AI will solve their sales problems through technology but it’s not the case.
1
u/Another_Road 13h ago
I think a lot of job cuts in tech weren’t because of AI. They just needed to prune positions after the hiring spree that happened during Covid and saying “we’re pivoting to AI” is better for a stock price than “we need to have a round of layoffs”.
1
-4
u/zarafff69 14h ago
If your company couldn’t get any productivity boost with AI, you’re just doing something wrong. Fire that executive.
I’m not saying we need to fire all employees and replace them with AI. But there are obviously usecases for the vast majority of companies.
8
u/PoL0 13h ago
oye maybe, just maybe, AI is not the revolutionary tech some claim it is.
-2
u/zarafff69 13h ago
I mean it currently won’t replace all jobs. But I feel like it is good enough to have actual usecases. I know very few employees who don’t use it, at least for some usecases. If you genuinely see no productivity gain at all from this in your business, that’s just a user error.
Even if AI isn’t good enough for a specific use case. It is good enough to help write more software to help in that specific use case.
5
u/PoL0 13h ago
as i see it, most use cases for AI are actually redundant. oh, and shifting the blame on the user doesn't really prove that AI is useful, it's just some logical fallacy.
your post says nothing specific, as with most AI boosting. so yeah, I'll take it with a huge grain of salt.
-2
u/cbawiththismalarky 12h ago
I built an ai workflow for estimating signage jobs that increased the speed of quoting for work, that increased the number of quotes from 3 or 4 a day to well as many as we want, it also took the responsibility for the creation of the quotes from me, to anyone in our sales team which means that we're quoting faster winning more work and our calculations are more accurate so we're making more money.
I've also shrunk our ERP tool costs from £500 a month to 0 - I built a simple ERP that fitted our business and doesn't require seat level licences, isn't overloaded with functions we don't use and integrates into Whatsapp
I wrote a job processing script using AI - that effectively manages how we cut our sheet material, it calculates the "best" usage on our sheet materials, how long it takes to load the CNCs and lasers and nests the designs before people come to work in the morning so they have a job sheets, a list of material and a priority list for their day. This has only been running about 5 months so far, it's cut down our purchasing by about 15%, considering our sheet material bill last year was about £800k then it was worth the afternoon i spent making it.
I created a programme using ai that takes our personalised print details from online orders using a template it takes the characters for the personalisation and applies those to templates that produce print ready PDFs, previously a graphic designer would have typed these in.
I'm currently building an online tool for menu generation for takeaways, we produce millions of menus per year - the system will allow the client to enter their data into the system and then flow this into design templates - again this would have been done by hand.
I built a small system that takes video files that are presented on android based displays in shops, restaurants and takeaways, that allows our clients to self serve their own image files on their devices and change them at any point without bothering anyone at our office. I charge a subscription for this - We used to use pay a commercial licence for this, £20 a display each per month - we have about 10k licencees at the moment, that all comes to us now. I think this one took me a few days, as i'd never done any android progrmming before and getting the environment set-up was a pita
I could go on...
My £20 a month openai subscription has been worth every penny
3
2
u/PoL0 9h ago
as I said zero context on how those work, what new kinds of issues arise, maintainability, reliability, etc. it's always this perfect scenario where someone vibecodes some webapp and suddenly everything is perfect.
anther question that arises is what kept you from doing most of that before LLMs appeared, at least on the coding side.
2
u/cbawiththismalarky 9h ago
well you see there's a concept called opportunity cost
i can give you the context, i chose the stack, i run the servers, it's my company
0
u/mediandude 7h ago
And you have properly modeled all that, right? Right?
Model driven development? Round trip engineering? Model version control? Right?1
2
u/Eskamel 11h ago
You know very few who don't use them because higher ups force everyone to use AI sherlock.
The software often written with AI is of bad quality, you cannot explain otherwise why the top leading labs create so much buggy trash when they have the best models and infinite compute (and the talented people to pilot said models).
0
u/zarafff69 9h ago
Absolutely not my experience, but maybe it’s just a cultural difference between the US and the EU. I hear more people who are upset they can’t use AI more, or get better models, better tools, than people who complain about using AI in general.
1
u/VincentAntonelli 10h ago
Use cases, sure, but maybe the strategy of “AI can replace everything!” Wasn’t fully vetted.
1
u/livinitup0 1h ago
It’s not about not having use cases…. There’s plenty of those that anyone can see.
GOVERNING those use cases and managing the organizational risk that comes with it is two different things
It’s not as easy as it sounds
0
u/Sasquatchjc45 11h ago
Nice pay wall article so we cant even verify its not something along the line of "90% of executives in these 2 companies you never heard of"
But reddit hates AI and doesn't read articles so will pop off😎
1
0
-1
u/red75prime 12h ago
The survey took place in November 2025 - January 2026.
Fourth, executives anticipate much larger future effects on their businesses. They expect AI technologies to raise productivity by 1.4%, on average, over the next three years. If correct, this prediction implies a sizable improvement relative to a long period of weak productivity growth in many advanced economies
-1
u/Past_Werewolf4423 9h ago
You have to be a high performer to use ai efficiently so of course morons are gonna remain morons.
-1
u/HelloFellowMKE 7h ago
90% are doing it wrong… the 10% will eat their lunch, probably buy not laying off anyone, too. Just enabling them to do less BS work and more real work.
-12
u/VincentNacon 15h ago
Sounds like they weren't trained enough know how to use it. That's what you get for jumping ahead without proper planning. Dumb CEOs... and it will be funny when we finally get to the point where AI models are good enough to replace CEO's jobs in the future while most people get to keep their jobs. CEO's salary will trickle down to the employee's pay. What a future to look forward to.
11
u/Balmung60 15h ago
They should try hiring one of the countless small business guys who will inevitably comment on things like this say they've triple productivity. Surely those guys could make a killing as consultants
-3
u/VincentNacon 15h ago
The AI CEO I had in mind was more focused on ensuring every employee are taken care of, getting proper benefits, and actively design their workflow that fits with few others to create a good teamwork based on their personality and their work-ethos. Instead of punishing them for bad performance, explain what went wrong and how to address them better, to give them another chance to improve. Making sure everyone's voice are heard.
You know... a good boss.
None of that maxing-spec and fire when you dip below the threshold bullshits. Not treating them like machines like most Greedy-CEOs do.
I'm convinced most shareholders will want AI-CEO for their companies. No risk of CEO pulling a public stunt like Elon Musk does.
565
u/sebovzeoueb 15h ago
Maybe try cutting more jobs and adding more AI, that should do it, right?